Tag Archives: health

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #113: Navaz Habib, DC – Vagal Action and Health


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Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First.

Today, we are joined by one of the leading voices in the world of vagus nerve health, functional medicine, and autonomic nervous system regulation, Dr. Navaz Habib.

Dr. Habib is a chiropractor, educator, international speaker, and author of the bestselling books *Activate Your Vagus Nerve* and *Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve*. His work has helped bring the science of the vagus nerve from the research world into practical clinical medicine, helping providers and patients better understand the powerful connection between the brain, immune system, gut, metabolism, and overall health.

On today’s episode, we take a pediatric lens to this fascinating topic. We explore how vagal tone influences inflammation, stress resilience, digestion, sleep, emotional regulation, and neurodevelopment. We discuss what happens when the autonomic nervous system becomes dysregulated, how chronic stress can shape a child’s physiology, and why the vagus nerve may be one of the most important communication highways in the body.

We’ll also dive into practical strategies that families and clinicians can use to support vagal function, including breathing techniques, movement, nutrition, social connection, sleep, and other evidence-informed interventions that can help children build greater resilience in an increasingly stressful world.

If you’ve ever wondered how the nervous system intersects with immune health, behavior, gut function, and chronic disease risk, this conversation is for you.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Navaz Habib.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 15 – Virus and Food

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Should You Feed A Viral Illness?

This Nature news article discusses emerging evidence that eating may acutely enhance immune responsiveness, particularly through effects on T cells, the learning part of the adaptive immune system. The paper centers on the old saying “feed a cold, starve a fever,” suggesting there may actually be biologic truth behind at least the “feed a cold” half of the proverb.

The article reviews a new study in mice and humans showing that T cells, key adaptive immune cells responsible for recognizing and attacking pathogens, behave differently depending on recent nutritional status. Researchers found that T cells from recently fed organisms proliferated more rapidly and mounted stronger activation responses compared with those from fasting states. In essence, nutrient availability appears to act as a metabolic “permission signal” for immune activation.

….
Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 14 – The Adult Chair


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The Adult Chair, the Adolescent Chair and the Child’s Chair

The Adult Chair by Michelle Chalfant is a practical framework for emotional maturity, self-awareness, and healing old patterns that unconsciously drive adult behavior. The central premise is that most people move through life reacting not from their grounded adult self, but from unresolved emotional states formed during childhood and adolescence. She organizes this idea into what she calls the “three chairs”: the Child Chair, the Adolescent Chair, and the Adult Chair.

The Child Chair represents the emotional self formed in early childhood. This is the place of vulnerability, fear, shame, abandonment, loneliness, and unmet needs. When people react from this chair, they often feel helpless, emotionally flooded, overly dependent on validation, or afraid of rejection. Many adult relationship conflicts, according to Chalfant, are actually wounded children (in adult bodies) interacting with each other while wearing grown-up clothing and carrying iPhones. Same child like nervous system. Better accessories. Think of the statement: lipstick on a pig, you cannot dress up dysfunction and make it disappear.

The Adolescent Chair reflects the defensive coping strategies people develop to protect the wounded child. This includes control, perfectionism, blame, avoidance, rebellion, people-pleasing, passive aggression, and emotional shutdown. The adolescent self seeks power and protection but often creates disconnection and conflict. Chalfant argues that many high-achieving adults unknowingly operate from this chair, appearing successful externally while internally driven by fear, insecurity, or the need for approval.

The Adult Chair is the goal….

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 13 – Birth Order


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Birth Order

Birth Order Is Biology, Not Birthright – so says a new paper in MedRxIV (Kramer et. al. 2026)

Here is a short field guide to how sequence shapes the immune system, and maybe the brain in children.

We’ve treated birth order like personality trivia.
First-borns are “responsible.” Youngest are “free spirits.” Middle children… well, we forgot them.

This paper suggests something more interesting: birth order is a biologic exposure.
Not destiny. Not diagnosis. But signal.

Across a very large dataset, the researchers mapped birth order against hundreds of diseases. The effects are small for any single child. But the pattern is consistent at a population level.
Children are not born into identical biology, even within the same family.
Each pregnancy changes the mother. Meaningfully. Immunologically. Successively.
Each fetus inherits a slightly different environment.
Epigenetics in full swing.
It turns out that sequence matters.

What Changes Across Pregnancies?

Three levers move, quietly, predictably:

1) The Maternal Immune System Learns
Pregnancy is not passive. It is negotiation. The first pregnancy = naïve immune system learning tolerance. Subsequent pregnancies = trained, adapted immune responses
That training alters: cytokine tone, antibody profiles, placental signaling
The fetus is downstream of all of it.

2) The Placenta Is Not a Copy-Paste Organ…
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 12 – Creatine and Microbiomes


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Creatine and Microbiomes

A new 2026 Cell Metabolism study explores a compelling and increasingly central idea in modern biology: the gut/brain/immune/metabolism axis is not just associative, it is mechanistic. Specifically, Dr. Lu and colleagues investigate how the gut microbiota can directly influence depressive behavior by reshaping systemic and neural metabolism. This is another in a long running list of papers describing the amazing work that bacterial commensal microbes do for us. In this case, our minds and moods.

“Although peripheral-brain crosstalk regulates energy metabolism, its role in depression remains unclear. Here, we used metabolic profiling to reveal elevated fecal creatine alongside reduced plasma and cerebrospinal fluid creatine in both patients with depression and mouse depression models. Exogenous creatine produced antidepressant-like effects mediated by gut microbiota. Bifidobacterium pseudolongum was identified as a significantly reduced gut bacterial species in depression, correlating with impaired creatine absorption. Subsequent supplementation with Bifidobacterium enhanced the antidepressant effects of creatine. Mechanistically, B. pseudolongum-derived acetate promoted the creatine transporter (Slc6a8) expression in intestinal epithelial cells via histone acetylation. The Slc6a8 mediated the antidepressant-like effects of creatine. Neuronal creatine deficiency influenced energetic metabolism and neurophysiological function. In patients with depression taking antidepressants, co-administration of creatine and Bifidobacterium increased plasma creatine levels and reduced depression scores. These findings identify the Bifidobacterium-creatine combination as a promising antidepressant strategy and highlight the critical role of gut-brain energy metabolism in depression.” “The brain, as an energy-intensive organ, relies on precise metabolic regulation to maintain synaptic plasticity, neurotransmitter synthesis, and stress response systems. Accumulating evidence implicates energy metabolism dysregulation as a hallmark of depression. Neuroimaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) have identified marked glucose hypometabolism in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) of patients with depression. Cerebral mitochondrial dysfunction and ATP imbalance have been mechanistically linked to depression progression. Notably, emerging studies emphasize the bidirectional interplay between peripheral metabolic signals and central energy regulation, which is fundamental to neural metabolism. Clinical observations such as fatigue, appetite dysregulation, and unexplained weight fluctuations in patients with depression further suggest systemic metabolic disturbances spanning peripheral organs and the CNS..” (Lu et. al. 2026)

This is next-level medicine. Mental health can no longer be framed as a disorder of genetics, experience, or circumstance alone. This work opens a clearer window, showing how the microbiome participates as an active partner, shaping brain function through the metabolites it helps produce and deliver. Compounds like creatine are no longer just peripheral players. They become signals, fuel, structure, and information, bridging gut and brain, metabolism and behavior…. and more

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 9 – Leadership


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Brene Brown – Leadership

Tools to Teach Your Children and SELF

“Stand firmly enough to lead, loosely enough to listen.”

Strong Ground by Brené Brown published in 2025

Breaking down this new book by the excellent Brene Brown, we find that strong leaders don’t eliminate tension or risk. They hold it. And this is key! What does the hold look like? How does it show up to the team?

The theme in my mind is “toughness with tenderness”

Clarity is kindness. Vagueness is avoidance dressed as politeness.
You can be both confident and uncertain. That’s not weakness, it’s reality.
Values are not what you believe. They’re what you do under pressure.
Most leadership failures are emotional avoidance, not strategic failure.
Accountability without empathy is cruelty. Empathy without accountability is chaos.
People don’t disengage because work is hard, they disengage because trust erodes.
The goal is not control. The goal is grounded presence in uncertainty.
You can’t build brave cultures with armored leaders.
Paradox is not a problem to solve, it’s a condition to manage.
If you’re always comfortable, you’re not leading. You’re maintaining.

I especially, like the last one. Discomfort is the path to growth in all things. Think euthermia for temperature, not a recipe for human cellular health or plants for that matter. Temperature through environmental swings are keys to protein elaboration for handling the cold and the heat. The lack of swing equates to a lack of adaptability…. and a piece on the Stakeholder.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 16 Issue 8 – Systems Biology


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THE FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE STORY
DR. JEFF BLAND

“Change occurs from the outside in”
Dr. Bland

Medicine has a habit of believing it has arrived. Every generation of physicians looks around the room, surveys the white coats and microscopes and MRI machines, and quietly assumes the puzzle is mostly solved. History laughs at that assumption. The truth is that medicine is always mid-sentence in a very long story.

Dr. Jeff Bland has spent decades helping rewrite that sentence.

In a recent conversation on The Root Cause Business of Medicine Podcast, Dr. Bland’s life work comes into focus. Not as a rebellion against medicine, but as an expansion of it. His influence on nutrition science, biochemical individuality, and what we now call functional medicine has helped move the field away from the narrow idea that disease is simply something to suppress or worse just name. Instead, he has pushed a more interesting question forward: why did the disease appear in the first place?

That sounds obvious. It is so far from obvious that most physicians do not ask the question.

Bland’s career sits at the intersection of nutrition, biochemistry, genetics, and what he calls systems biology. Over the decades he has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and written many books aimed at both clinicians and the public. But numbers don’t tell the story. What matters is the conceptual shift he helped introduce.

For most of modern medical history, the dominant model has been reductionist. And reductionism is the scientific approach of breaking complex systems into their smallest parts. It has given us antibiotics, vaccines, and surgical techniques that save lives every day. But it has also left a blind spot. When we zoom too far in, we sometimes lose the map of the entire ecosystem.

Human biology is not a machine made of replaceable parts. It is a network.

It is supremely interconnected…. and a literature review
Dr. M

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